A Final Disappointment

Ramadhan 10 1429

There's stuff in God Is Not Great that is worth reading, despite my comments over the past few days. The demolition of certain forms of intolerance and fanaticism is bracing and Hitchens raises suitable levels of indignation at the follies described (sometimes honestly so.)

It could have been a good book if it had aimed its criticism fairly and evenly at human folly. But it didn't. Instead the argument revolved around the following thesis: Religion poisons everything. I know this because the statement is made more than once and it always appears in italics in case a reader is too obtuse to realise that this is the crucial point and it really cannot be argued with.

Connoisseurs of ridiculous sweeping statements might find much to admire in this one. There's the wonderful vagueness of 'Religion', which will later allow the author to argue for various forms of fascism as religious in nature. Then there's the extraordinarily almost willfully fuzzy 'everything'. And the verb itself - 'poisons' - who can argue with something that manages to sound extremely nasty whilst not actually meaning anything at all? The amateur psychologists amonst us might usefully notice the oddly totalitarian language employed by the writer. This kind of sounds like a throwaway line from the worst kind of fanatic. Just replace 'Religion' with a few other loaded nouns to see what I mean. It gets quite scary.

But enough of this. My fasting is going well and I've been dipping into a Collected Poems of Geoffrey Hill to restore some sanity (even though it seems most of them are by their very nature poisoned. Hah!) For those who enjoy a difficult read Hill is my recommendation. I reckon I understand about twenty percent of what's going on - but I have faith that the other eighty percent is equally wonderful. A bit like life, I suppose.

Even More Disappointment

Ramadhan 9 1429

By now I should have given up on the Hitchens rant, but I keep forgetting to mention his dismal treatment of Islam. (Actually the dismal treatment of faiths is fairly non-discriminatory, to do him a kind of justice, but I suppose I regard this one as sort of my area of expertise.) I kind of expected that he might be reasonably well informed on this one, given his outspoken support for the invasion of Iraq and statements on various parts of the world that have Islam as their central belief system. What I genuinely didn't expect was comment at the level of the average sort of chap who knows nothing except what he has picked up from glancing at the Daily Mail. He appears to be aware of Karen Armstrong's useful and very basic introduction to the faith, Islam, because he cites it in one of the few footnotes to the text. (Scholarly his book is not.) However, as far as I can tell he hasn't read it. Or if he did, he didn't understand it. His errors on simple matters of fact are plentiful and egregious.

I'll mention two, both of which happen to resemble closely the kind of misrepresentations of Islam that have been characteristic of western thought through the centuries and which I thought Edward Said's Orientalism had skewered for good. The first is the lazy assertion that the Prophet (peace be upon him) was essentially a plagiarist. Hitchens seems completely unaware that Islam has never seen itself in any way as an innovative faith and that the Prophet was intensely aware of the repetitions of Judaic and Christian ideas in the Holy Qur'an. That was the whole point. It is simply impossible for a Muslim to consider the Prophet as in any way superior to other Messengers. We are expressly instructed to regard Jesus, Moses and Abraham as equals and all messages of the many thousands of prophets there have been as essentially the same.

The second is the extraordinary idea that the Prophet was a conscious fraud. By the way, this is not argued for by Hitchens but simply asserted (as a kind of joke, I think), initially in the course of a discussion of Joseph Smith of Mormon fame. Now of course this idea has been current since medieval times, finding its fullest expression in the caricature figure of Mahomet but no serious biographer of Muhammad (peace be upon him) in the world of western scholarship in modern times has suggested such a thing. So for Hitchens to revive such monstrous allegations so flippantly beggars belief. - Well, no, supposing as he does that anything approaching a religious experience is by its nature fraudulent and corrupt it does make a kind of sense.

I'm guessing there's a connection here with Salman Rushdie's portrayal of the Prophet as Mahomet in The Satanic Verses. It looks as if Hitchens has picked up what little he thinks he knows about Islam from his buddy Sir Salman. In fact, the 'issue' of the so-called 'satanic verses' themselves is the centrepoint of the contemptuous dismissal of Islam in the single short chapter devoted to the faith in God Is Not Great. But a key point of Rushdie's defence of his novel was that he was consciously using what he knew to be a wholly prejudiced view of Islam in a brilliantly ironic manner. (So brilliant that I couldn't work out how it was actually meant to be seen as ironic.) It looks as if he forgot to tell Christopher about this in their in-depth discussions of the novel.

Further Disappointment

Ramadhan 8 1429

Normally I try to avoid what Mum would term harping on about things but I'm still not done with commenting on Christopher Hitchens's God Is Not Great, or at least aspects thereof.

My reference yesterday to the somewhat juvenile tone of much of the text, particularly regarding its modes of argumentation, finds a curious parallel with material from the earliest chapter in which Hitchens talks about doubting the religious instruction being given by his teachers and what that doubt felt like. Here's one such bit:

The headmaster, who led the daily services and prayers and held the Book, and was a bit of a sadist and a closeted homosexual… was giving a no-nonsense talk to some of us one evening. 'You may not see the point of all this faith now,' he said. 'But you will one day, when you start to lose loved ones.'

Again I experienced a stab of sheer indignation as well as disbelief. Why, that would be as much as saying that religion might not be true, but never mind that, since it can be relied upon for comfort. How contemptible. I was then nearing thirteen, and becoming quite the insufferable little intellectual.

The problem seems to me that Hitchens remains a fairly insufferable, and often little, intellectual. In the anecdote above, recounted from an adult perspective, I get no sense of recognition of the rather sad headmaster as a frail, silly man, trying to do his best to communicate something of the frailties of faith to the kind of over-bright students that he knows he's not connecting with. Of course it's contemptible, a great deal of what goes on in school is, but we learn to live with it, and grow to understand why the fatuous statements teachers are so prone to are necessary in negotiating the world around us.

At a guess I'd say the headmaster probably had deep doubts about his faith, as so many 'believers' do, and had been deeply hurt, as most of us have been, at the deaths of some he dearly loved, and knew that his clinging to faith had helped make some sense of the pain. And I guess he was making some kind of effort to let the boys get a glimpse of the pain of the real world awaiting them in a way that related to the dull conventions of their worship. But Hitchens doesn't allow his caricature, whom I take in a kind of bond of faith with the writer to have been a real human being and not just a convenience for another neat story to explain away all forms of religious education, to have any sense of depth at all. (By the way, it's easy to put together a number of explanations of the little scene that take us into Terence Rattigan country. The curious thing is that Hutchins doesn't do any of this - seems temperamentally incapable of doing so.)

I'm also curious about the head being a 'closeted homosexual.' How did the writer know this? Does Hitchens have no sympathies at all with homosexuals of that period who had to remain closeted or lose their jobs - especially headmasters? The implications of the line seem to me quite gratuitously nasty. If the guy is still alive I think he'd have fair grounds for legal action.

Incidentally I can remember at junior school, in my last year, aged eleven, being embarrassed for the headmistress, a lovely lady, when she was telling our class that when we left we'd find out that some of the stories we'd been told in religious class might not be literally true but we weren't to think that our teachers had been deliberately lying to us. Of course, most of us, probably all, had figured this out a long time before and being told all this so apologetically was contemptible, but also sweet and sad and sort of brave and honest and part of the nature of things. I can't remember being idiotic enough to feel superior, and I must say that makes me feel quite good about my younger self for once.

Disappointment

Ramadhan 7 1429

Now back in Singapore after the first day of the fast that's really gone smoothly. I seem to have adjusted to the demands of the month, but tomorrow will mark my first day of fasting at work this year and that's a whole new ballgame and kettle of fish to boot.

Read Christopher Hitchens's God Is Not Great yesterday and was generally disappointed. The back cover blurb gushes about 'erudition and wit', 'eloquent argument' and a 'close and learned reading of the major theological texts' but I seemed to miss most of that, other than one or two quite good jokes. Of course this might be put down to my inherent bias as a theist but I suspect I'd have felt much the same in my agnostic phase.

I'll give one example of what I mean. The fairly obvious rejoinder to the argument that the fanatical excesses committed in the names of various faiths over the centuries prove the inherent danger of (any) religious faith is that whilst it might have been possible to lend credence to that position circa 1900 (assuming you ignored the excesses of revolutionary France and other odd bits and pieces of strictly secular inhumanity along the way) the ghastly spectacle of the twentieth century and the track record of the various secular/humanist faiths therein clearly make the argument untenable. We have usefully discovered that our species is pretty horrible regardless of possession of religious faith.

But not so for Mr Hitchens. He deals with the 'objection anticipated' in Chapter 17. And his argument, as far as I can work it out (it really is that slippery) goes like this: religions are totalitarian in nature; the dreadful things done in the twentieth century were done by totalitarian regimes; therefore they were religious in nature - which is why the major faiths (represented almost entirely by Roman Catholicism for some reason I can't quite figure) didn't do much about them or were happily complicit in them.

I mean, really!

Throughout my reading of the book I was wondering for whom he was writing. I felt as if I being dragged into one of those discussions that's so fascinating when you are in your early teens and it feels really, really important to question everything. Is this stuff meant for grown-ups?

In Transit

Ramadhan 6 1429

We are temporarily resident in Mak's house, just outside Alor Gajah. Actually we stopped off at the hospital in Melaka on the way up last Sunday to visit one of Noi's aunties who's suffered a stroke and dropped off Noi's cousin Rokiah with her two grandchildren who've stayed here the whole week. They'll be coming back with us to Singapore tomorrow, I assume, though I'm not particularly well-inforned regarding family matters.

My cold seemed to turn into quite an unpleasant fever yesterday evening and I can't say I enjoyed the drive from KL, though listening to the final CD from my Master and Commander set was some compensation for feeling like a complete mess. Today I've felt a whole lot better. In fact, this is the first day of fasting that I've felt reasonably normal. I also managed to get out for a bit of a run after breaking the fast, my second of the month. So, all in all, things might be said to be looking up - not that they were ever all that far down.

Looking Out

5 Ramadhan 1429

Fasting is a curious mixture of the public and private. Even mild deprivation makes you intensely inward-looking, registering each stage of the struggle to get through the day, and this is allied, or should be, to an intensity of reflection upon your behaviour in the light of the expectations set by the faith by which you subscribe to live. But there’s an awareness that this is not something you are attempting alone. Yours is a tiny, frankly insignificant part of a shared experience that sustains each of its fragments. It’s pretty silly moaning about how tough it is when the children next door are getting on with it uncomplainingly.

My wife is plugged into this aspect of fasting in a way I know well but which always manages to surprise me. She’ll be busily figuring out what food she’s going to pass to the neighbours, and then preparing it, whilst I’m busy wishing the hours away.

But today has been tough. I think I’m running a bit of a temperature and most of me from the head down aches. Fortunately, I’m good at feeling sorry for myself.

This was really not the right condition in which to be reading The Shock Doctrine but I finished the last couple of chapters earlier today, finding the book difficult to put down yet not exactly easy to pick up again. Difficult to put down because I found it full of revelations – stuff I thought I knew about but had never really grasped. A simple instance – a section on the growth of Israel’s economy since the breakdown of the talks in Oslo shed a new and yet obvious light on the motives of her various governments. Not easy to pick up because so much of Klein’s analysis, beyond the straightforward recounting of human misery, is deeply depressing. In the end I felt a sort of moral compulsion (allied to a desire to know what is going on around me, I suppose) to keep reading and I’m glad I did. (At least there’s some real hope in the final chapter.)

Of course, this is not to say that I think she’s got it right in every respect, though the sheer abundance of obviously well-researched material drawn from a wide range of sources makes its own point. She finds a narrative in an extraordinarily wide panorama of events that comes off as being a little too pat at times, especially to a reader who subscribes to the cock-up theory of history. But the narrative is useful as a starting point, I think. It took me beyond the ‘oh dear, don’t bad things happen to those who least deserve them?’ mode to an uncomfortable, but much more real place.

The problem is though: what to do?

Profits

4 Ramadhan 1429

The sore throat of yesterday has duly transformed itself into the streaming cold of today. This, coupled with an exacerbated sense of human greed, destructiveness and selfish idiocy derived from The Shock Doctrine has left me a touch down in the dumps.

In a time of mild deprivation it is interesting if somewhat distressing to reflect on the mechanics of greed. The obvious churning need to get even more experienced by those who’ve already got far too much to be able to actually do anything with it of any practical value to themselves is exceedingly odd. What is stranger is that many of these poor folk are said to be highly intelligent, so you’d think they’d be aware of the absurdity of their behaviour, assuming that a degree of self-awareness goes along with that intelligence.

I can relate to greed in terms of a longing for a bigger home, a nice garden, a plasma tv or a state of the art hi fi system, though I can’t honestly say I really want any of those things. But in terms of knowing you’ll stand to gain millions (on top of the millions you already possess) through reducing another country to rubble and believing that this does not somehow compromise your good judgement?

In the meantime, it’s back to Paul Bremer and the looting of Iraq. I wonder where they’ve got lined up for the next feeding frenzy?

Turning Inward

3 Ramadhan 1429

A day so far characterised by a sore throat. Somewhat solipsistic, but the vulnerability engendered through weakness is always likely to take you to that kind of place. The important thing is to get away from there.

This morning I finished Anthony Burgess’s Earthly Powers, quite a good way of keeping in touch with the bigger world. It’s his best novel, I think. My hesitation comes from a realisation that some of the shorter ones – A Clockwork Orange, Abba Abba – hold together very successfully, gaining a certain intensity as a result of their brevity. But of the longer novels this is the only one I can think of that sustains itself and feels close to fully achieved. It helps that the central character evokes a degree of sympathetic understanding that Burgess usually withholds from his protagonists who are all too often mere cyphers. Perhaps it was the challenge of having to give a genuinely felt rendering of homosexual experience that led Burgess to the creation of a real character for once, despite the fictive games that are played around him.

My other means of keeping in touch with something bigger than my sore throat (apart from getting a couple of hours of work done) has been to embark on a reading of Naomi Klein’s The Shock Doctrine. The difficulty here is to stop myself from descending into pointless rage as she unfolds some of the dreadful wickedness perpetrated in the name of free markets and the like over the last forty years or so. It helps that none of this is really terribly new, but I’m not sure I want to read another account of the misdeeds of the Pinochet regime in Chile now this one has left me so depressed. (And that’s just the first chapter or so.)

Come to think of it, Earthly Powers is also pretty bracing on the subject of human wickedness, and idiocy. Perhaps the cultivation of one’s own garden, and sore throat, is the way to go?

Holding Fast

2 Ramadhan 1429

Another day of feeling tired as the body adjusts to the lack of liquids. Now suffering from a distinct, intrusive headache, though nothing really debilitating. I’m not sure whether it’s easier getting through this at work or on holiday. But then, ease is not the point. A sense of dis-ease can be extraordinarily valuable.

Bright spot of the day: Noi called me into the garden in the early afternoon to bear witness to a group of monkeys scuttering around on the roofs of the houses behind ours. One was carrying a baby. Noi thought they were up to no good and rushed up to shut the bedroom window. I’m not too sure what would count as wickedness for a monkey.

Another Beginning

1 Ramadhan 1429

I’ll be breaking the fast in another ten minutes or so. As always, the first day presents its particular problems of adjustment, moving into slow time. The last three or four days have seen some conspicuous consumption on the gastronomic front so the discipline involved is a welcome one.

This is the first time we’ve found ourselves fasting at Maison KL, at least as far as I can remember. It’s odd how the experience of fasting writes itself on the environments in which it takes place. Here the struggle is unfamiliar and, therefore, strangely intense, at least for the moment.

I am fiercely tired but without headache, for which I am thankful.